As the Spring rears its head in Cambridge after a long and violent Autumn and Winter, ACT would like to highlight a variety of exhibitions in which the work of artist and ACT Professor Renée Green is featured throughout the continental United States.
Location: The Warehouse, Dallas
Dates: February 2-June 29, 2024
Renée Green’s work in the exhibition: Color I, 1990. Mixed media: latex paint, paint chips, Plexiglas, rubberstamped ink on vellum, wood, 481/16 x 961/16 x 315 /16 inches
Excerpt from Color I:
Jamaica Dream – Golden Brown – Saucy Crème – Haiku – Demoiselle – Painted Lady – Enchantress – Coy Pink – Brazil Brown – Golden Tan – Burmese Gold – Rose Nude – Mexican Orange – Indian Ivory – Inca Gold – Remembrance – Panama – Heartland – Empire Yellow – Deep Jungle – Salsa – Siamese Green – Orient Blush – Paradise Green – Lover’s Knot – Havana Sunrise – Spicy – Pink Beauty – Jungle – Chinese Orange
Other artists in the exhibition: Giulio Paolini, Jiro Takamatsu, André Cadere, Edward Krasinski, John Latham, Mario Merz, Daniel Buren, Piero Manzoni, Charlotte Posenenske, Sherrie Levine, Mona Hatoum, Andrea Fraser, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, among others
Exhibition curators: Lisa Le Feuvre, Thomas Feulmer
From the Exhibition Statement: “How can we attempt to understand the value systems that surround us and guide our lives? With this question, For What It’s Worth: Value Systems in Art since 1960 brings together 80 artists from across generations and geographies to explore one of the most urgent concerns of our time: the growing challenges to value systems that have arisen out of confrontations with social, political, and cultural power structures. Grounded in the international conceptual art tendencies of the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition builds on the strategies of this era that continue to reverberate through art and the world today.”
More information: For What It’s Worth @ The Warehouse
Location: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Dates: January 30 2024 – January 5, 2025
Renée Green’s work in the exhibition: Space Poem #1, 2007. 27 double-sided banners, polyester nylon and thread. Each banner, 42 x 32 in.
Excerpt from Space Poem #1:
Ongoing Stuff
Human Shields
Moral Geometry?
Huge Holes
Edward W. Said
Alleviating Suffering
Other artists in the exhibition: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jenny Holzer, Lorna Simpson, Roni Horn, Glenn Ligon, Rivane Neuenschwander, among others
Exhibition Curator: Ruth Erickson, Erika Umali
From the Exhibition Statement: “Highlighting the rich interplay between imagery and text and the related practices of looking and reading, Wordplay draws primarily from the ICA’s permanent collection to showcase how contemporary artists have played with words to animate and expand their art practices. Text has been part of visual expression for centuries, but “text art” as a genre began to proliferate with the emergence of conceptual art in the 1960s. Artists in the exhibition use text to probe philosophical questions, express and subvert political messages, challenge notions of identity, and connect their artwork with multiple references, writers, and cultural icons.”
More information: Wordplay @ ICA, Boston
Location: Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT
Dates: January 30-March 3, 2024
Renée Green’s work in the exhibition: Code: Survey Detail, 2004. Photographic print, 39 x 45 in.; Code: Survey Plan, 2004. Photographic print, 39 x 45 in; Code: Survey Wall, 2004. Photographic print, 39 x 45 in; Code: Survey [Website], 2006.
Excerpt from Code: Survey’s website:
Keyword: Obvious
“Nothing in the lives of prosperous white people in Greater Los Angeles—including those of local television journalist who, for them most part, were in the entertainment business or, at most, the fait divers business, not the news business—had prepared them for the outpouring of rage, despair, or simple acquisitiveness that were the hallmarks of the rioting. People knew about poor Blacks, of course. People knew about the hard lives of immigrants, of course. Indeed, they quickly became exasperated with those who harped on the subject. “Why accentuate the obvious?” This, at any rate, is what I was asked repeatedly during the time I spent in Southern California gathering the material for Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World. But what was being alluded to in reality was less “the obvious”—AIDS is obvious, and so is loneliness, to mention two subjects of more than passing interest to the West Side—than the irrelevant. For just as in Blade Runner most white people have retreated “off-world,” in Los Angeles in 1990 and 1991 the territory east of Highland Avenue might as well have been on another planet.”
David Rieff. Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World (New York: Touchstone Books, 1991), 262.”
Other artists in the exhibition: Daniel Buren, Rachel Harrison, Karrabing Film Collective, Sol LeWitt, Cameron Rowland, Fred Sandback, Aki Sasamoto, Cindy Sherman, Franz Erhard Walther, and Carrie Yamaoka, among others
Exhibition Curator: Ben Chaffee
From the Exhibition Statement: “There is a tradition at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery of celebrating anniversaries with exhibitions that reflect on the legacy of Wesleyan alumni artists. For Always Being Relation, the gallery’s 50th anniversary exhibition, the notion of “alumni” expands beyond its conventional definition of University graduates, putting in dialogue work by artists who studied at Wesleyan with visiting artists who have exhibited in the gallery since its opening in 1973.
The title of the exhibition is a quote from Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America (1935). In her talk “Plays,” Stein speaks about the function of relationality within landscape in the theater. Even without moving, the individual aspects of the landscape are always in relation to one another, “the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other.” In Stein’s treatment, everything is contingent except for the presence of relationality itself.”
More information: Always Being Relation @ Contemporary Art Library
Location: Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA
Dates: April 13 – May 11, 2024
Renée Green’s Works in the Exhibition: Endless Dreams and Water Between, 2009. Digital film, color, sound, 74 min.; Excess, 2009. Digital film, color, silent, 13 min.; Stills, 2009. Digital film, color, silent, 69 min.
Exhibition curator: Hafthor Yvnagson
Exhibition Statement: “The exhibition brings together two multi-channel films: Sky Hopinka’s In Dreams and Autumn (2021) and Renée Green’s Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009). In their experimental films, the two artists create dense poetic collages of words and images that reveal dreams and cultural memories linked to the notion of homeland. The issues of migration, dislocation and cultural exchange are critical to both artists. They speak of transit and how relationships between and to communities shape our understanding of our place in the world.”
More information: Dreams and Autumn / Endless Dreams @ Western Gallery
Excerpt from Endless Dreams and Water Between:
I’ll conclude my letter with something to ponder, as it relates to what I’ve written. We can wonder with Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze:
Why something rather than nothing, but why this rather than something else? Why this tension of duration? Why this speed rather than another? Why this proportion? And why will a perception evoke a given memory, or pick up certain frequencies rather than others? In other words, being is difference and not the immovable or the undifferentiated, nor is it contradiction, which is merely false movement. Being is the difference itself of the thing, what Bergson often calls the nuance.
I’ll leave you with those words until the next time. From each of our islands, let’s stare at the moon.
